desperate for change

There have been much written about ways to find your passion in life. Steve Pavlina’s approach is not too bad, as described in “How to discover your life purpose in about 20 minutes.”

What essentially happens when you do this is you are excavating layers of your consciousness from the outside to as deep inside as possible, until you strike gold. I’ve tried this exercise at various times in my life with mixed results. Sometimes I come up with goals that I used to have when I was a young child, other times I end up with something that just isn’t so satisfactory. I think that the problem with me is that writing as a brain-digging tool is not really doing it for me.

So, what could we try instead? Well, this summer I had the fortune of landing an interesting job. Well, if you’ve known me for any length of time, you know that when I use the word “interesting,” I really mean to say odd-ball off-the-wall wacko.

Anyhow, the job is being an unskilled labourer flunkie, working under the supervision of a man who is renovating his house. The man in question is actually an old-coworker of mine, so he went easy on me; he used to be my manager so I am used to having him as my boss. The duties of the job is essentially: perform whatever task is required of me by my boss. Things include putting up insulation, ripping out parts of the house, moving heavy things around, and when there is nothing else left to do: digging in the backyard.

To be more specific, the digging was really filling in a ditch that has already been dug. Nevertheless, filling in the ditch required me to dig at the large mounds of previously dug dirt, and then filling up the ditch. For all intents and purposes, I am digging.

This was back in July, when the weather was sweltering hot. My allergies were killing me, but I wanted to give the work a decent effort anyways. I managed to get into “the zone” moving the piles of dirt around. I got into an amazing line of thoughts and questions: what would I rather be doing instead of digging? Was there something urgent that I really needed to be working on?

Well, yes. I wanted to learn to play Kermit’s rendition of Hurt. And I wanted to get my blog rolling.

I didn’t quit the gig right away after coming to this realization. But when I eventually quit, I did exactly what I set out to do.

The process that I went through was something like that of a certain prisoner of war. If you are not familiar with the story, this man spent his POW days by playing golf in his head. When he was finally released, the first thing he did was to hit the golf course to play the best game ever in his life.

While I wouldn’t say that I totally discovered my life purpose, I can say with satisfaction that I am one step closer. Maybe I should go back to digging to see what else I can come up with.

Digging image used under Creative Commons from: